Opinion
Column

Boozing airline pilots need their wings clipped

Any airline suggesting that getting there is indeed half the fun could be accused of engaging in bald-face effrontery. There's absolutely nothing pleasant about air travel today. It's simply a means to an end.

We're probed and poked, X-rayed and screened, forced to line up for hours at various checkpoints where scowling busybodies, who probably couldn't make it as real cops, glower at us like we're cattle suddenly stricken with TB.

Then, when we make it to the front of the line, we're told to jettison the most mundane items -- our innocent water bottles tossed aside as though the contents had been scooped from a Chernobyl-area well -- and our shoes viewed as though discovered on a North Korean launch pad.

And that's before we've made it aboard the battery-chicken pen that goes by the name of coach travel on the world's airlines.

Most of this silliness is done under the banner of security, for which we pay an inordinate amount in various fees tacked onto tickets. Perhaps it has indeed worked -- the world's terrorists deciding it's easier to hijack a truck to slaughter the innocent than endure the mind-numbing horror of airport screening.

Us regular folk have no such option. We simply want to go somewhere that's too far away for rail or road. So we grit our collective teeth, arrive three hours in advance and tell ourselves, half-heartedly, it's at least making the journey safer.

Yet, you go through all that annoyance and inconvenience only to discover the bloke getting into the cockpit to fly this sardine can of an aircraft is reportedly drunk as a skunk.

Last week, Calgary police charged a pilot after he allegedly passed out drunk in the cockpit of a Sunwing plane, with 99 passengers and six crew aboard as it sat on the YYC tarmac.

When the pilot's blood alcohol level was later tested, he was found to be more than three times the legal limit for driving a motor vehicle, according to police.

This is far from unique. Last summer, two Air Transat pilots made front-page news in the U.K. when they were hauled off a plane for allegedly being inebriated before it left Glasgow for Toronto.

A month later, it was the turn of a pair of United Airlines pilots, who were nabbed trying to fly out of the same Scottish airport. (Maybe it's the lure of all those single malts available in the lounges.)

And, if you want a real hoot, look at the YouTube footage of the Indonesian pilot stumbling through security on his way to the cockpit this past week. Fortunately, his inane, pre-flight babblings raised enough concern among passengers that many tried fleeing the plane.

Of course, airlines try to turn this horror show on its head by having the gall to point out that while their highly paid staff might by blotto, they didn't actually get off the ground, so everything's fine and dandy.

Well it's not. Why should paying customers be subjected to so much screening they feel like an over-squeezed melon by the time they drop into a contraption laughingly called a seat, while pilots can get into the cockpit three sheets to the wind? How can we be sure there aren't planes taking off every day with those behind the controls drunk as skunks?

The rules for pilots are simple enough -- no flying within eight hours of consuming any alcohol. Random checks aren't enough. The simple type of disabler machine that can be installed on a car's ignition, ensuring that a driver blow clean before the vehicle starts, should be mandatory for pilots to access a cockpit.

And if that infringes on their rights, well, they can always line up with the rest of us at security. Oh, and pay for the privilege.